This weekend, basketball fans subscribed to Global Destiny Cable were shocked to find that Basketball TV was no longer part of their channel line-up. The cable company announced that Solar, which owned the channel, had signed an exclusive deal with their competitor, which everyone took to mean Sky Cable, the country’s biggest CATV provider. It’s a curious turn of events given the history involving Solar, Sky, Destiny, and BTV.

In 2007, Solar Entertainment Corporation had a falling out with Sky, which at the time was broadcasting six Solar channels: BTV, Solar Sports, Jack TV, Crime/Suspense, ETC, and 2nd Avenue. Reports differed on the reason of the rift between the entertainment companies; some said that it had to do with Manny Pacquiao – Solar, which owned the rights, chose as its broadcast partner GMA-7, the biggest rival of Sky Cable’s owner, ABS-CBN – while others Sky simply wanted to drop some of Solar’s channels in favor of its own.

Solar moved quickly to prepare for its departure from the Sky lineup on the first day of 2008. The company signed block time deals so that three of their channels – C/S (on RPN-9), ETC (on SBN-21), and 2nd Avenue (on RJ-29) – were broadcast over free television. Their three other channels, BTV, Solar Sports, and Jack TV, became available exclusively on Destiny.

With the new setup, Solar used an all-out campaign to get subscribers to switch from Sky to Destiny. Jude Turcuato, the marketing director of Solar Sports who had since left the company, led the media blitz to promote the move. (Curiously, my two “favorite” writers Quinito Henson and Krip Yuson both wrote extensively about the issue for the Philippine Star.)

And the campaign worked. Sky bled subscribers who were moving to Destiny, so much so that less than a year later, the leading cable company had to sign a truce with Solar to bring back BTV to its lineup, first as a premium channel, then later as a regular channel.

Part of it was the fact that subscribers really wanted the programs that were available on the Solar channels, particularly the NBA games on BTV. But another factor was that Sky Cable had acted like a bully in its treatment of Solar during the whole brouhaha, and subscribers – especially those who hung out online – were only too happy to make the switch to give the cable giant a bit of comeuppance. It really was the loyalty of those subscribers that allowed Solar to win over Sky Cable.

Things cooled down substantially between ABS-CBN and Solar in the years that followed. Then earlier this year, the two companies signed a major deal to that allowed PBA and NBA games to be aired over Studio 23, ABS-CBN’s UHF channel.

Then this weekend, BTV’s exclusivity deal with Sky was announced. A brief official announcement was posted on the BTV website about the expiration of the channel’s contract with Destiny, together with a bullshit marketing line about how subscribers should instead pony up cash to pay for the company’s premium NBA package.

To Solar, this was probably just another in a long line of business decisions. To basketball fans who were shocked by the move, however, it comes as a slap in the face from Solar, the company that encouraged them to switch all those years ago, and the company that they supported loyally.

In the end, it won’t matter to Solar, which obviously only cares about the bottom line. The company won’t be affected at all, because NBA fans are always going to jones for NBA games, we can’t help ourselves but fork over cash to watch Pacquiao fights, and Solar has cleverly signed exclusive deals to deliver these properties.

So this may be meaningless, but I just wanted to write this for the record, because it needs to be said, that the people running Solar are assholes, and the subscribers who bailed them out all those years ago don’t deserve this.